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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • It’s simple really. It’s not murder when someone in the military kills an enemy combatant. Murder is illegally taking another’s life, and members of the military can legally kill enemy combatants. That’s laid out in the Geneva Conventions and all of that.

    The President is the commander in chief, so he doesn’t need immunity to order some terrorists taken out. That’s the way it’s worked for nearly 250 years. Joe Citizen is not a member of the military and is not the president, so generally they can expect to get in trouble for that sort of thing.

    The President can order some terrorists killed the same way a fighter pilot can shoot down an enemy plane, a soldier can throw a grenade into an enemy foxhole, or navy captain can order the shelling of an enemy position.

    Also note that immunity here doesn’t mean something is legal for that person. The act is still just as illegal as it has always been. It just means that the person who has immunity can’t be prosecuted for it. And in the case of absolute immunity, can’t even be charged for it, unlike things like qualified immunity where someone can still be charged and then can argue immunity as their defense the courts get to decide if it actually applies.

    As such, a member of the military doesn’t have or need immunity, because what they are doing isn’t illegal. That also applies to the president in that sort of situation.


  • The thing is, this country has existed for nearly 250 years without this ruling and the president having any sort of immunity. The idea that we suddenly need this is ridiculous. So what changed? Well, Trump of course. And yes, this is all about Trump. This ruling didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from Trump making claims about immunity, the lower courts dismissing the claims as nonsense, until the supreme court took it up and here we are.


  • Yes. Well, sort of.

    Different types of graphics cards would map themselves to different areas of memory, so it was possible to have more than one graphics card so long as the memory used by the graphics cards didn’t overlap. Generally, this meant one of the cards was monochrome and the other could be something like VGA. DOS itself had no idea what to do with more than one graphics card. However, both graphics cards were mapped to to the processor’s address space and DOS had no memory protection so applications had full access to the hardware and could talk directly and utilize both graphics cards.

    The way I saw it used was with a very old computer controlled microscope. The monochrome card/monitor was actually the main screen that the computer booted up with (which was kind of funny with a 486), and this is where you controlled the microscope in their application. The VGA card was the secondary that was used to display images.



  • toddestantoMalicious Compliance@lemmy.worldWork from home
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    5 days ago

    They have the ability to turn off the web access now. My company recently did just that - if I try to access office.com on a personal device, my log in is blocked. Works fine on a company controlled device.

    I’m not sure how they tell the difference since it’s through the browser. But my guess would be something to do with the lack of all their security software they load onto company controlled computers that have hooks into everything.


  • toddestantoMalicious Compliance@lemmy.worldWork from home
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    5 days ago

    I would also never let corporate IT manage a device, e. g. a laptop connected to my private network at home.

    That’s pretty standard for working from home. I’m expected to use the company provided, managed laptop with my internet connection.

    I figured so long as I made sure of things like there weren’t any open file shares and things like routers and IP cameras were password protected there wasn’t a whole they could see.

    If I was really paranoid I could set up a VLAN or something.


  • toddestantoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    6 days ago

    The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

    Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

    So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.




  • The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

    These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

    Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

    The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

    Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

    Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

    It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.



  • toddestantomoviesFuturistic movies timeline
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    25 days ago

    My guess is this was graphic made some time ago and the line on the chart was the current year. Given the newest films on the list look to be Idiocracy and Children of Men from 2006, that would make the line sometime in the mid-late 2000’s.


  • toddestantomoviesFuturistic movies timeline
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    25 days ago

    Idiocracy and Children of Men are from 2006, which I believe are the newest films on the list. Though the bar for Star Trek suggests that it’s depicting the timeline from the 2009 movie, but that could be debated.


  • I’m using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I’d likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I’m a happy camper and I’ll keep on using it.

    I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000’s or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.


  • toddestantoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    27 days ago

    Well, that’s a misleading title. All the countries in their list have some debt, just less than most.

    All countries carry some debt, because they need to show a history of reliably making payments on that debt in case they need to borrow money in the future for whatever reason. Not all countries, however, run massive deficits every year.




  • If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.

    You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.